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The mainstream media’s narrative that the Russian government interfered with the United States election, and that this interference invalidated, or at least tainted, Trump’s election has culminated in President Obama taking a series of measures against Russia, which consist of: imposing sanctions on the GRU and the FSB (the two major Russian intelligence organizations), four officers of the GRU, and two Russian individuals who allegedly used “cyber-enabled means to cause misappropriation of funds and personal identifying information;” expelling 35 diplomats and intelligence officials; and closing two Russian compounds in Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Long Island, New York. These actions were said to have been taken not only because of Russian interference in the election but for a number of other instances of Russian malfeasance that go back in time and are unrelated to alleged election interference. And there was no evidence provided that showed, or even claimed to show, that the particular individuals and entities covered by these measures had anything to do with the alleged election interference.[1]Robert Parry, “Details Still Lacking on Russian ‘Hack,’” Consortium News, December 29, 2016, https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/29/details-still-...-hack/

Like other common memes—such as anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism—used to silence debate, the exact meaning of Russian interference in the election is unclear—and Obama’s inclusion of a number of extraneous issues in his explanation for taking retaliatory action against Russia muddles the issue even more. The reference to Russian interference in the election includes a composite of alleged Russian misdeeds—“fake news,” computer hacking, and manipulating voting machines[2]Craig Timberg, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” Washington Post, November 24, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russ...364c83 –which are usually lumped together but are actually quite different and should be analyzed separately since the combination approach only serves to obfuscate the issue. Of course—and this probably would not be shocking to most readers of this essay—many of those who promote the idea of Russian culpability are not really concerned about pursuing a Socratic search for truth but instead want to anathematize Putin’s Russia and/or delegitimize Trump’s election victory.

Now to consider the ramifications of Russia’s hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and the reception and release to the public of this Russian-hacked information by WikiLeaks. While this is assumed to be incontestably true by the mainstream media, neither one of these allegations is rock solid at the moment. The alleged consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies is that there is sufficient evidence that Russia hacked the aforementioned emails, but the evidence for this has not been made available to the public nor is there proof that WikiLeaks relied on emails derived from Russian hacks. Given the fact that America’s intelligence agencies are not noted for being honest with the public, one would think that the mainstream media would give some attention to the critics of the dominant narrative.

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Reacting to these allegations, WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, claims that his organization did not release any information provided to it by Russia or a Russian proxy. And Assange does have a vested interest in being truthful in order to maintain WikiLeaks’ credibility, which has so far been impeccable. Confirming Assange’s contention is Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Assange, though not an official member of the WikiLeaks staff. Murray stated: “As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks.” He goes on to claim: “Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.” Murray alleges that the two sets of emails—from the DNC and from Podesta–came from American insiders but from different sources.[7]Craig Murray, “The CIA’s Absence of Conviction,” CraigMurray.org, December 11, 2016, https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/12/cias...ction/ Murray was also quoted by the Daily Mail as saying he flew to Washington for a clandestine handoff of a “package” in September.

Now it should be pointed out that the actual content of the emails released by WikiLeaks, which the U.S. claims to have been obtained by Russian hacking, has not been falsified. The information harmful to Hillary Clinton included the DNC’s behind-the-scenes support for her over Bernie Sanders (which included then DNC chair Donna Brazile’s feeding answers to Clinton before the latter’s debate with Bernie Sanders); Clinton’s unpublicized paid speeches—on foreign policy and the economy– to wealthy business executives and bankers revealing views diametrically opposed to her campaign positions; the collusion of mainstream media reporters with the DNC. For example, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank requested and got the DNC to do the research for a negative column he wrote about Trump.

If the WikiLeaks information were completely fallacious, it would not have been derived from hacking or even from leaks, but simply fabricated. Nonetheless, this defense is being made. The logical form of this argument is that hacking took place but that the released emails were doctored to make them damaging. But this is based on the fact that it is possible to doctor emails, rather than any evidence that the WikiLeaks’ emails were altered. The assumption being made was that Russia was capable of doctoring the emails, therefore, the emails must be doctored. For example, Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative, was quoted as saying: “I would be shocked if the emails weren’t altered,” and went on to say that Russia was well-known to have used this technique in the past.ix Similarly, Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin asserted: “We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange, who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton.” He referred to doctored emails that supposedly appeared on websites linked to Russian intelligence as proof that “documents can be faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign,” although Caplin did not say that the emails concerning Clinton’s speeches had been faked.x According to James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the spreading of false information by intelligence services “is a technique that goes back to Tsarist times.” Among his examples, he referred to the Soviet-spread rumor that the U.S. government developed the AIDS virus. Needless to say, this, too, had nothing to do with WikiLeaks much less the emails it released on Clinton and the DNC.[11]Tim Starks and Eric Geller, “Russians, lies and WikiLeaks,” Politico, October 12, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/wikileaks-rus...229707

Actually, it seems that much of the hostility to the WikiLeaks’ information has little to do with it being false but rather that the emails were pilfered and made public. Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman from California, who serves as the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Jane Harman, who is currently the president of the Wilson Center and a former ranking Democratic member of the same House committee state: “Russia’s theft and strategic leaking of emails and documents from the Democratic Party and other officials present a challenge to the U.S. political system unlike anything we’ve experienced.”[15]Adam Schiff and Jane Harman, “Russia attacked our democracy. That demands intense review by Congress,” Washington Post, December 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/russia-attac...e1d8f5 Note that these writers charge Russia not only with illicitly obtaining the emails but also of “strategic leaking,” which was obviously the work of WikiLeaks, and for which no evidence whatsoever exists that Russia determined when the materials would be leaked.

The New York Times Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes that “[t]he pro-Putin tilt of Mr. Trump and his advisers was obvious months before the election . . . . By midsummer the close relationship between WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence was also obvious, as was the site’s growing alignment with white nationalists.” Krugman goes on to blame the mainstream media for giving attention to WikiLeaks. “Leaked emails, which everyone knew were probably the product of Russian hacking, were breathlessly reported as shocking revelations, even when they mostly revealed nothing more than the fact that Democrats are people.”[16]Paul Krugman, “Useful Idiots Galore,” New York Times, December 16, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/useful-id...e.html However, if nothing harmful was revealed, it is hard to maintain that Russian hacking had a significant effect on the election. If harm were done to the Democrats, it was presumably caused by the media, which falsely implied that serious revelations were being made by WikiLeaks.

It is not apparent how receiving accurate information regarding political issues—which is what WikiLeaks seems to have provided—could really have a negative impact on American democracy; rather it would seem that it would actually improve democracy. The purpose of Voice of America is supposed to be to provide such information to foreign countries and especially to those where the governments prevent the facts from reaching their inhabitants. The idea is that people in foreign countries should know the truth about their own government and about other governments, as well.

The Washington Post was enraged when, in 2015, Russia shut down the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), relying on a law that “bans groups from abroad who are deemed a ‘threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation, its defense capabilities and its national security.’” The Washington Post wrote: “The charge against the NED is patently ridiculous. The NED’s grantees in Russia last year ran the gamut of civil society. They advocated transparency in public affairs, fought corruption and promoted human rights, freedom of information and freedom of association, among other things. All these activities make for a healthy democracy but are seen as threatening from the Kremlin’s ramparts.”[20]Editorial Board, “Vladimir Putin is suffocating his own nation,” Washington Post, July 28, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vladimir-put...a3b331 Presumably, such things as “transparency in public affairs,” fighting corruption, and “freedom of information,” are vital for creating a “healthy democracy” in Russia when promoted by a foreign organization but are a grave danger to democracy if a foreign entity should try to do the same thing in the United States.

The mainstream media has acted as if Russian efforts to influence American policy are something novel, that this had never happened to the U.S. before. And “policy” is used here rather than “election” because affecting policy is apparently Putin’s motive, not simply putting Trump in the White House with U.S. policy toward Russian unchanged. It is quite understandable that Putin would view Trump as a better President from the standpoint of Russian interests than Hillary Clinton since Trump advocated improving relations with Russia while Clinton was oriented toward exacerbating them.

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While the mainstream media implies that what Russia was allegedly attempting to do had never happened before, foreign countries had actually tried to shape American policies since the George Washington administration[21] when the ambassador from revolutionary France, popularly known as Citizen Genet, came to the United States in 1793 and sought to generate popular support to get the United States to modify its strict neutrality policy to one that would be helpful to France in its war with Great Britain. Genet even commissioned privateers to attack British shipping. Ultimately, however, President Washington and his Cabinet, angered by Genet’s activities that violated American sovereignty, demanded his recall. Genet simultaneously fell from favor in France as more radical Jacobins led by Robespierre took power and fearing he might face the guillotine if he returned to France, Genet requested and received asylum in the United States.

In 1867-1868, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. resorted to bribing lobbyists, newspapers, and members of Congress in order to make sure that the U.S. Congress would provide the funds for the treaty already signed by Secretary of State Seward (and approved by the Senate) to purchase Alaska.

Finally, let us explore the reasons for Obama’s retaliation against the alleged Russian interference in the election, which included activities—mostly, but not only, involving spying—that had been going on for years. An obvious question is: why didn’t Obama take action earlier?

In making major foreign policy decisions, Obama’s modus operandi has often been one of reacting to pressure—usually, but not always, from elite opinion—which has caused him to take positions contrary to his own, often more non-interventionist and pacific, inclination. This seems to have been the case regarding Obama’s policy toward Libya, Syria, Israel (his obeisance to the Israel Lobby until the very end of his presidency), and even Russia, where he initially sought a “reset” to achieve friendlier relations.

To conclude, the Russian interference narrative did not serve to prevent Trump from becoming president but it does seem that it will cause serious problems for his presidency and for American foreign relations as well, as America will drift further into Cold War II, which is something that Trump, if not facing obstruction, could have possibly prevented.

[22] Since the British navy controlled the seas, it would have been virtually impossible for Germany to provide military aid to Mexico. Germany, however, had been thinking along these lines and actually taking some actions in line with this view. See Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)

the Russian interference narrative did not serve to prevent Trump from becoming president but it does seem that it will cause serious problems for his presidency and for American foreign relations

Not necessarily. He may be able to discredit their narrative, and to replace it with his own narrative. After all, he’s done plenty of that during the campaign… And this time he’ll have the ‘bully pulpit’, so it should be easier….

Great article, the key question remains: why is there an obsession for a large part of Washington bipartisan elite to have a horrible relationship with Russia?

It is on its face self-defeating: Russia poses no real threat as a peaceful neighbor, it has lots of resources and the largest consumer market in Europe. Russia is also generally secular, relative socially liberal, and shares many of the same policies as US, e,g. fighting Islamic terrorism, checking China’s influence, etc…

So why the hostility? It makes West weaker, not stronger. It hurts global economy, it increases risks of a nuclear confrontation. It also cannot really achieve much beyond continued hostility and shouting at each other.

Unless I am missing something, the hostility with Russia has no conceivable – and realistic – final outcome. Russia is not about to collapse, and it is not about to revert to a Western-run 90’s ‘liberal’ utopia. Any actual and realistic threat to Russia’s existence could trigger a nuclear war – no winners there.

The disputes – from Crimea to Syria, from ‘hacking’ to Pussy Rioters – are oversimplified and intentionally misrepresented by the West. All of these issues are more complex, less clear-cut, and there is a valid and rational point of view on Russia’s side.

So why this unrelenting drive for more and more hostility? Can anyone explain this? Are there some deep emotional issues among the Washington elite? What’s the point?

The only part of the Washington elite that wants to treat Russia as no threat is the part that articulates the views of corporations who want to sell US shale gas technology to Russia, which will sell cheap and clean energy to China so they can destroy American manufacturing jobs. The time has come to try and slow China’s growth down.

Putin has reversed the Yeltsin era oligarchy that was bent on looting everything moveable in Russia. In doing so he pissed off some very connected Americans and Israelis. They want to get back to the loot trough. Sometimes it is as simple as evil men wanting to steal the wealth of others and hating those who stop them.

Are you kidding? Russia represents everything the Anglo-Zionist empire hates and fears:

– Russia is sovereign and not under the control of financial interests. It is not possible to financially strip-mine Russia. For example, the Russian central band keeps real interest rates above 3%, allowing savers to keep the benefit of their savings, unlike in the West.

– The Russian state under Putin has overthrown financial oligarch control, and the people know this. This accounts for his extraordinary popularity.

– Russia is a Christian country which has built or reopened an astounding 30,000 churches in the last three years. They do not allow gay marriage and are about as socially conservative as the US was in the 70’s. Jews are not allowed to dominate the national conversation or have inordinate control.

– Russia manufactures their own armaments and is a strong arms export competitor. The Russian state gets much more bang for their armament buck than we do, being effectively equal to us with 1/10 the military spending. This is more evidence of the independence of the state from financial oligarchs. Currently, Russian jets and missiles are markedly superior to American ones. (Don’t believe me? Google “F-15’s in Syria” The Pentagon responded to Russia bringing advanced jets to Syria by transferring a squadron of F-15E’s to Syria. The F-15 entered service in 1974. Each successive generation of US fighter jets since then has had inferior performance to its predecessor. This is disgraceful.)

– The very existence of Russian independence is a mortal threat to the evil Anglo-Zionist empire. Look at Snowden, still walking and breathing and calling bullshit on American retrogression. The existence of one free country holds out a dangerous example to all other nations.

I am not ‘kidding’, I am quite serious. You make good points – and the points about resources, obedience and pure anger at losing the 90’s opportunity to steal, all of that is true. But it really doesn’t explain the recent rapid escalation to an almost irrational hostility in Washington. Why escalate now? What has changed?

It also clearly doesn’t work, and it cannot work – one cannot wish reality away and Russia is not going to be defeated by these silly temper tantrums. I am assuming that we are dealing with grown-up, serious people in Washington (and Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London), they must know that the screaming and demonization do nothing to weaken Russia. If this is an infantile anger at recent setbacks, it will blow over. But I would think that advanced Western societies have their resident infantilism under control. (Or do they?)

So what if this is not just infantile screaming by people who lost their toys and want to show their anger. What if this is the way the Washington grown-ups are today? What if they genuinely lost it and truly believe all this insane stuff: “Putin wanted to influence the sacred election – it is an act of war!!!!” – where would you even start a rational discussion on this?

Civilizations collapse when their rational core is replaced by ambitious morons who can no longer tell the difference between reality and their own “narrative”, and even worse they don’t much care for reality.

You ask the question I’ve been asking myself. I don’t have an answer, but I’ve wondered if it could be any of these:

* inertia (the old guys running things might still be stuck in Cold War I)
* anti-homophobia (gays have a big influence on public opinion, and they hate Putin)
* profits (the Military-Industrial Complex has settled on Russia as the threat that will justify the weapons systems they want to sell)
* Europe (Russia is the only power that could draw away our European vassal states–the Germans were particularly cozy with Putin right before Ukraine blew up; the Gulenist coup happened just weeks after Erdogan got friendly with Russia)
* petroleum (can’t quite see how that fits here, but oil and gas are usually involved in Deep State machinations)

But it really doesn’t explain the recent rapid escalation to an almost irrational hostility in Washington. Why escalate now? What has changed?

Why now? Because in Syria, Russia got in the way of Zionist plans to fragment any countries in Israel’s immediate area that posed a potential threat to Israel’s regional domination (and perhaps an expanded greater Israel project). That looks like the best explanation to me.

I think these remarks from Frances Boyle are worth considering, as well, although this sometimes sounds like it might have been translated from English into Russian and back again, or something of that sort:

I regret to say what we are seeing here in the Unites States are the ascendancy of two factions in this country who are against Russia and the Russians. First is Brzezinski, who was Obama’s mentor when Obama was a college student in Columbia, and Brzezinski in 2008 ran all the foreign affairs and defence policies of the Obama presidential campaign and has stacked his administration with advisor on Russia at the National Security Council comes from the Brzezinski’s outpoll CSIS there in Washington D.C. I graduated from the same Ph.D. programme at Harvard that produced Brzezinski before me.

He is a die-hard Russian hater, he hates Russia, he hates the Russian, and he wants to break Russia up into its constituent units, and, unfortunately, he has his people, his proteges in the Democratic Party and in this Administration. Second faction lining against Russia are the neo-conservatives, for e.g. this latest Brookings Institute report calling for arming the Ukrainian military in these Nazi formations which is now reflected in this latest bill just introduced into the Congress yesterday, and the neoconservatives feel exactly the same way against Russia and the Russians.

I went to school with large numbers of these neoconservatives at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz and all the rest of them. Many of them are grandchildren of Jewish people, who fled the pogroms against Jews, and they have been brainwashed against Russia and the Russians. So you have two very powerful factions here in the United States against Russia and the Russians who are driving this policy, and I regret to report there are very few voices opposing this.

Obama and his professional disinformation minions concocted a Russia-hacking-DNC BS story to rationalize to the public their desires to punish Russia for thwarting their evil plans in Ukraine and Syria.

Clearly that is the strategic goal. But it has already succeeded in Syria – it doesn’t matter that Assad is staying, Syria is fragmented. Since the goal has been achieved, why would the symbolic defeat in Aleppo trigger this level of hostility?

I agree about gays, that is a secondary driver for the hate campaign. They are a derivative ally.

The problem with the Brzezinski explanation is that it only partially fits the facts: the early Obama administration genuinely tried to have better relations with Russia. And Brzezinski for all his Russo-phobic reputation is actually a realist and has spoken out against the excesses in the last few years. There is the usual ‘neo-con grandkids of pogrom refugees’ – yes, many are, but there are also many who are from the same background who are not obsessive Russia haters, often just the opposite.

“the old guys running things might still be stuck in Cold War I”

There are some old Cold Warriors and some still angry at Vietcong (McCain), but the recent energy in the Attack-Russia crowd comes from the younger people – often millennials and recent Ivy League graduates in the media and in Washington. They are post Cold War and their hatred seems fresh and genuine. How does one explain that phenomenon?

The military spending goes on and on – the need for an excuse is hard to document. There is almost no chance that some program would get cancelled because there are not “sufficient enemies” – so that explanation also seems secondary.

It is a puzzle, there doesn’t seem to exist any adequate explanation. Maybe it really is just stupidity – ambitious people who are where they are because they know how to take tests, how to write ‘memos’, and how to please their elders. But they don’t know or care about much else. It is an elevated form of shallowness and mental lazyness. But it remains a puzzle. How can an advanced society drop its intellectual standards so quickly?

The insanity continues as “liberal” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Israel) suggested that the Intelligence agencies will “get back” at President Trump, and that all Americans should praise their secret and mostly illegal, unconstitutional, and inhuman efforts. The few remaining true progressives/liberals in America must have gagged at his comments.

The backers of HRC seek global domination and they know that time is against them. They have over-reached and now find themselves on the back foot. They are ruthless and desperate so this is why their actions make little sense if viewed through the lens of what is good for the ZUSA.

If Russian hackers did not exist, it would be necessary for the CIA to invent them. The Empire’s geopolitical agenda of putting Russia in its place is thereby advanced, the truth of the allegations is irrelevent.

That Trump is a Russian agent is a big fat stupid naked lie riding on the back of an even bigger lie. The lie that Russia is a threat to the U.S. Its a pity that so many man hours must be devoted to refuting it. The lie is perpetrated by imperialists who intend to rule the world by force of arms. They are psychotic and extremely dangerous to the people of earth. Bubba, Dubya and Obama have been happy to serve them. Hillary was to be the fourth horseman.

The fourth horseman is mentioned in Revelation 6:8, “I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him.

Trump is not an imperialist. He is not one of them. He is his own man. He is a nationalist. He would be a player in a multi-polar world. He is a threat to their insane plans. They have tried and are trying to neutralize him with lies and slander and have failed. Now they must deal with him or martyr him. Which will it be?

I have read with interest the various explanations about why the United States’s foreign policy seems so pointlessly anti-Russian. There are a lot of reasons, ably articulated by the commenters. It seems to me that, to put it bluntly, the United States, or at least a good portion of its leadership, is in the midst of a national nervous breakdown, brought on by Donald Trump’s unexpected election. I would counsel Russia and its leadership to be very careful in dealing with the U.S.–you simply can’t tell what an irrational person/nation might do.

Allow me to propose another cause for the mysterious Anglo-Zionist hostility toward Russia.
That is, the instability of the empire. The huge military spending supports the Petrodollar system. The petrodollar system keeps the dollar as reserve currency. Then dollar creation by the federal reserve taxes all users of the dollar, or the world. This tax helps finance the military spending. And so on, ad infinitum. This positive feedback loop holds the status quo in the current state.
But if the petrodollar system is broken, the US will have to pay its own way. The US tax cows would rebel, then bye bye to the empire. Imagine if Germany and Russia joined in a trade zone, let alone a gold standard union. The US standard of living would drop like a rock overnight. We’d have to relearn to produce stuff. Perhaps US oligarchs would lose control in the resulting social disruption.
So to avoid this scenario, the US deep state whips up anti-Russian hysteria aimed at both US and European sheeple.

Well they couldn’t put the Pantsuit into the… President siute. Even when they got the best bunch of ducks in a row ever! Almost the perfect storm of idiots all in sink to force or cram the worst of the evils, two or more) even against unlikely DT, and with the PTB & company jumping ship from the Republicans enmasse, still they got beat.

The Democrats almost had the thing, But they are myopic special issue, (needs) Identity politics people, and not of sufficient caliber to be involved in international diplomacy etc.

I see several commenters have mentioned dumb and stupid, as reasons, I agree, these nitwits are way out of their element, and as to why they pick on Russia now, because they are naive enough to think they can snub, insult, push with impunity, and they seem to be getting away with it. But they hurt America, for having such low grade fools representing it. A bunch of cretinous egotists who are run secretly by puppeteers, and backed up by brute force.

“But it really doesn’t explain the recent rapid escalation to an almost irrational hostility in Washington. Why escalate now? What has changed?”

I am glad you are persistent in asking these questions and being satisfied by answers being offered. I do not have answer either. But I may ask more questions.

What was the true objective of 2009 Reset? Was it trap? Who really sabotaged it?

Perhaps we must go back to 2009 and the Reset that Hillary and Obama started with Russia. In Sept. 2009 Obama cancelled the defensive shield in Poland and Czech Republic and then in April 2010 they signed START treaty in Prague. What Obama wanted to get from Russia in return? What else Russia wanted? Or was it trap? But the relations remained good even after Polish president and all Polish NATO generals got killed in Smolensk in April 2010 three days after signing the START treaty.

There are various theories about the crash in Smolensk. One of them is that it was a false flag intending to implicate Russia and destroy the Reset and possibly it was a part of a coup against Putin.

Who was behind it? The hawks and neocons (in cooperation with Russia’s GRU elements) wanted to proceed with the operation against Iran while Obama and Putin were against it? After Smolensk the de facto no-fly zone was imposed over the whole Europe (Eyjafjallajökull volcano) when perhaps the fate of relationship with Russia and perhaps the fate of the world was being decided. Did Putin find out who was really behind the Smolensk crash? Anyway the Reset was then preserved. Who had to bend over backwards more: Obama or Putin? In later part of 2010 a major shake up in GRU took place and several generals ended up having accidents and some units of GRU were reassigned to FSB.

Things started going sour in 2012 when the operation in Libya started. Medvedev who was then a president must have been asleep at the switch and did not veto it in UN. Putin watched the video of Qaddafi being murdered several times and allegedly vowed to never let anything like this happen again. He also became president that year, The US was meddling in the election process against him. In parallel with Libya the operation in Syria started. Fighters and weapons were moved between the two countries. It was happening as if against the will of Obama. In Sept. 2013 Putin kind of saved Obama’s ass who clearly did not want to go ahead with bombing of Syria by having Assad giving up his chemical weapons. Neocons were furious.

One reason I am very interested in this is because I am looking for reasons to like Obama. And Syria in 2013 might be one of these reasons. But after that not much has changed. Money and support for rebels was flowing from the US and other countries. This tells you that the colossus like America has its momentum and policies that will not easily change regardless of will and beliefs of some people in power. Hersh wrote article on how gen. Dempsey and DIA was sabotaging CIA in Syria by sending defective weapon supplies to rebels supposedly to gain credibility in the eyes of Assad to keep the communication channels open with Damascus via Berlin, Tel Aviv and Moscow.

Then in 2014 the anti-Russian coup was engineered in Ukraine (some thing it was neocon’s revenge for Putin’s meddling in their meddling in Syria) that forced Russia to annex Crimea. He had no choice. And this is how Putin became a new Stalin and Hitler. The war against Putin and Putin’s Russia was in the open.

In winter 2014/2015 a brand new project called IS/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh was unveiled with saturated media campaign of their self-advertised atrocities. I think that many videos of executions were staged. And what was their purpose? It allowed the US to create a coalition to start bombing the ISIS also in Syria. Lots of countries joined it: Denmark, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and later Australia in 2015 and France. But their bombings were anemic at least as ISIS in Syria was concerned. Did they bomb Syrian forces? The coalition did not have a mandate for the no-fly zone as they had in Libya that if they had it, it would finish Assad off.

I like to think that the next stage in attempt to escalate crisis in Syria was the refugee crisis in 2015. Somebody organized it. Somebody cut off UN funding to refugee camps in Turkey. Somebody took care of logistics. Lots of money. Maps to Germany in Arabic. It was not Germany doing it, was it? Was it to get the public opinion of Europe behind the final solution of Syrian crisis by destroying Assad? Would the escalation in Syria where Iranian troops were fighting destroy the deal Obama was working with Iran? Was Merkel’s decision to embrace the invaders a way to diffuse the crisis and avert calls for no-fly zone? Did her decision give Putin extra few weeks to prepare Russia’s engagement in Syria?

Did Trump in June 2015 know about the impeding refugee crisis in Europe. His speech about illegals, border and wall preceded pictures of marching columns of young men approaching Hungarian and then Slovenian (Melania’s home country) borders by about six weeks. Who was Trump’s source? Our military or Netanyahu? Those who engineered that crisis?

In all this it beats me what was Netanyahu’s role. Surely he wanted to attack Iran. Surely he wanted to have Syria destroyed and destabilized. So why he was so nice to Putin? What took place between him and Putin in Moscow in summer 2015? Then he went there two more times. A bromance? Why Israel was so obliging to Russia engagement in Syria in which Russia used small and inferior force? Just four dozens of planes with one dozen of fighter planes while Israel itself has over 400 F-15 and F-16 and Turkey over 200?

Why are they so afraid of Putin? What kind of goods Putin has on them? Certainly it is not because of Russia’s military strength.

Agree with most reasons given for the current hyped hostility to Russia. Two extra points:
1. Trump publicly “aligned” himself with a more “open” policy towards Russia. When the leaks occurred it made sense to the DNC to link & tar BOTH Trump & Russia with every evil under the sun (two for price of one). And naturally the anti-trump forces continue with the farce.(Imagine charging a president-elect with treason as some in the msm have done : mind-boggling !)
2. Hyping up the Russia-hate is handy for any future false flags, provocations etc to justify retaliation.

There are many plausible reasons for the anti-Russian dialogue specifically the alleged vote hack scenario but one cannot discount a very obvious one and that is the destroyed credibility of the MSM in the mob’s eyes.

How else to explain that they all walked in lockstep and some major ones were predicting a Gorgon landslide and equally the statistical impossibility of a Trump win right up to election night only to have major ostrich egg on their collective faces the next morning. “Hell hath no fury like fake news outlets scorned” as Francis Bacon might say.

So now the implication would be that they were right (as always) but some evil elf in the Kremlin changed the tally. Lame for sure but we are dealing with lamestream media. The top honchos know that their days of influence are numbered. Only a collective ignorance can delay their demise.

A small point I wish to make taken from the body of the article is that whenever someone states that a controversial document ( perhaps The Protocols) are a forgery, it is incumbent for someone disagreeing to state “a forgery of what?” A forgery is not the same as a fake document created out of whole cloth.

I have found it hard to reserve even shallow attention for the hacking/interference allegations, never mind apply deep reasoning to it. So I appreciate pieces like this.

I have assumed from the get-go that these narratives’ sole purpose was for the Dems–or more specifically their funders/puppetmasters–to stay in the headlines by any means necessary. “Stay in the headlines” means “work the system to maintain the position to keep telling stories.” As any PR or advertising or marketing specialist can tell you, the most important part of a PR or ad or marketing campaign is to stay on message. The message doesn’t have to make sense or be true, because its mere repetition is the point, not its content.

These stories serve to keep that voter base paying attention and emotionally mobilized. The stories don’t have to make sense or be true. This isn’t reason playing out, it’s secular-religious hysteria.

The Dems appeal to a chunk of the electorate that operates from emotionalism, messianic zeal that flips over to destructive rage, virtue signaling, and a desire to feel like heroes for rebelling against whatever whatever.

I’m not a fan of assigning human motivations (like revenge) to institutions (like the US establishment), but if I was trying to explain the recent escalations by the revenge motive, then I would probably put sheltering Snowden front and center.

I don’t think the crash in Smolensk is an issue; it has always been clear what happened there, and it’s nothing sinister.

Things are crawling out of the woodwork. This election cycle for no intended reason has become an accidental fumigator of creepy crawlies. It has also started a sort of political trench warfare between the two principal creeper nests. We’ve known of the existence of the so called ‘deep state’ but now, at last, we realize how shallow it really is.more https://robertmagill.wordpress.com/2017/01/07/jeepers-creepers/

He will have to frame any action within loud support for protecting America’s security, but it seems to me he must have ways of responding. It will be interesting to see if he uses them. I am not all that familiar with the ins and outs of the top levels of the US security bureaucracy, but here’s the view of someone who is:

In my view, this is not the driving force for the anti-Russian policy. It is instead a way to whip up some popular liberal support for it.

Cato’s approach of looking for a range of reasons is clearly the right one, since there is no one authority driving policy, but rather a range of groups whose interests converge in one policy direction on a particular issue. This is true for any substantial state and for any sufficiently significant policy area, and especially so for US foreign policy. Looking for one single reason why any major policy direction is pursued is futile.

As such, the homosexual lobby is clearly one of the forces driving anti-Russian policy in US sphere countries, if not necessarily the most powerful. I think it should not be too blithely underestimated, though, as a part of the general globalist/antinationalist/social radical ideological alliance that dominates the US sphere media and political high ground.

That said, you are clearly also correct that US regime frustration with Russian involvement in defeating their regime change project in Syria is also clearly very significant, although anti-Russian sentiment in the US regime long predates that particular issue.

Brilliant analysis revealing the sad state of affairs currently existing in America. The ongoing propaganda is having its intended effect influencing a good portion of the citizens (e.g.: over 50% of Americans during George Bush’s second campaign still believed Iraq and Saddam were involved in 911!) What is one to do?

Why now? Because in Syria, Russia got in the way of Zionist plans to fragment any countries in Israel’s immediate area that posed a potential threat to Israel’s regional domination (and perhaps an expanded greater Israel project). That looks like the best explanation to me.

The foaming-at-the-mouth Russophobia and the Victoria Nuland & CIA-orchestrated coup in the Ukraine occurred after Russia intervened in Syria re: the red line issue (and chemical attack staged by Turks and CIA).

No patriot wants any foreign power influencing a US election. Therefore, I’d like to see the actions of China, Israel, Mexico and the EU investigated with vigor equal to that brought to bear on Russia.

Why now? Because in Syria, Russia got in the way of Zionist plans to fragment any countries in Israel’s immediate area that posed a potential threat to Israel’s regional domination (and perhaps an expanded greater Israel project). That looks like the best explanation to me.

The foaming-at-the-mouth Russophobia and the Victoria Nuland & CIA-orchestrated coup in the Ukraine occurred after Russia intervened in Syria re: the red line issue (and chemical attack staged by Turks and CIA).

Can SESes not appeal adverse personnel actions to the Merit Systems Protection Board? I also think that SESes can be hired outside the normal civil service process–one of the original purposes of the program was to draw on outside talent. GS-15s might not be all that useful–they’re more likely to be thinking of their careers in four years if Trump isn’t re-elected (in the toilet). It’s bureaucratic “inside baseball” things like this that Trump needs to be made aware of so that he can clean house in the intelligence establishment. It is obviously hostile to him.

It looks like CNN Has tried to pull the wool over our eyes once again. This time, they used a screenshot from the Fallout 4 Video game to paint the picture of Russian Hacking. To bad that’s not what a real hacking screen looks like. And an image you will only find in the video game! Nice Try Clinton News Network!

This whole business is so infantile and it is demeaning to the dignity of the United States.

Of course, as we have clearly seen over the years, the intelligence agencies of all states attempt to covertly gather sensitive information about each other – indeed, even when they are not antagonists. Consider the US hacking of Angela Merkel’s phone or Israel’s spies Jonathan Pollard and Lawrence Franklin.

Those in possession of state secrets have an obligation to secure them and, if they are penetrated, the blame is to them alone. The DNC and Podesta emails were not even state secret material either!

Obama’s petty and stupid response to the current unproven allegations against Russia will haunt his legacy and Hillary’s bizarre contention that Putin personally “had it in for her” is yet another sign of her mental instability.

I saw yesterday that the fact of the Russians celebrating Trump’s victory was taken as further proof of their complicity in Hillary’s downfall – how could they possibly be expected to behave otherwise? Give me a break!

Yes. The chutzpah patrol only knows how to double down / pick up nickels in front of a steamroller. That strategy looks fine right up until it blows up completely. It could easily happen that they beat Trump. It could also easily happen that they blow themselves up.

Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton was urged by “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” to demand a recount in three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—in which Clinton seemed to be slightly ahead in pre-election polls but which were won by Trump by narrow margins.

That is not quite true, Hillary pretended to be above it all, and used ‘Green Party’ candidate Jill Stein as a proxy.

Which raises its own questions.
who covered the estimated $3.5 million cost of the endeavor.

Again, not true, she ‘crowd-sourced’ the money, perhaps a small portion of the cash was left over from Stein’s own campaign.

Raising so much so quickly indicates a plutocratic contribution.

the Soviet-spread rumor that the U.S. government developed the AIDS virus.

It was not a rumour, and has never been convincingly refuted. There was much scientific analysis behind the claim, connected to related viruses.

The Americans came up with the ‘African Green monkey’ bullshit, claimed to have found earlier cases in Africa, there are many auto-immune-system collapse disorders, there has never been any convincing evidence for the claimed (and very few) earlier cases of auto-immune deficiency found in old colonial health records, and claimed to be evidence of an Africa origin of AIDs, having been related to HIV.

The fact is, patient zero and all of the early cases were in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Fire Island scene in Noo Yawk. Wikipedia even misidentifies the real patient zero, with some spreader of the disease that they say was patient O.

I am never part of those scenes, often bullied as straight, as often treated nicely as accepting, although I have had good friends who were same-sex lovers, but the phenomenom of interpretation of HIV-AIDS, as opposed to other auto-immune syndromes, it has really become wild propaganda.

Patient zero was certainly a homosexual Nord-Amerique man.

Propaganda to divert people’s attention from this is very strong, another example of the disconnection between pre-mass-‘net paper info and now.

I do not want to write at length on this, now, but am making a very good case.

Your article is alright, but not very good, my comments before the AIDs-related ones may assist you to write a little better.

the spreading of false information by intelligence services “is a technique that goes back to Tsarist times.”

No shit Sherlock? I goes way farther back than that, I read the rest of the article, wow, a dim bulb struggling to be bright. You may get there, writing is not all bad.

Great comment. It’s worth noting, though, that the US standard of living in the intermediate to long run would not drop for the middle and working classes. It’s the looter class (and their clients in the underclass and the bureaucracies to serve them) which would lose out in a really big way.

Clearly that is the strategic goal. But it has already succeeded in Syria – it doesn’t matter that Assad is staying, Syria is fragmented. Since the goal has been achieved, why would the symbolic defeat in Aleppo trigger this level of hostility?

I was thinking of “now” in terms of a larger time-frame, going back at least to the Sochi olympics, which is when I started to especially take notice of the anti-Russia rhetoric. So I wasn’t thinking of Aleppo specifically, but going back to Russia’s negotiation to thwart an attack on Syria in response to the chemical attack which was being blamed on the Syrian government. That seems to be when things really started heating up.

Syria is fragmented, but it’s not over yet. I think it may be made more whole in the future. Additionally, it hasn’t been fragmented to the extent originally desired.

And there must be some anger that Russia would step in and intervene at all, even if much of what was desired has already been accomplished.

Brzezinski has at times expressed more moderate opinions, but most of what I’ve seen, even in recent years, has been quite anti-Russian. Maybe I’ve missed some statements, but what I’ve seen from him has been pretty consistent in treating the situation in the Ukraine as a case of Russian aggression, deserving sanctions at least. And the “reset” under Obama I would need to go back and look at more closely. Is it possible it was a feint of some sort? I have to admit I wasn’t following US-Russian policy very closely at the time.

And I’m not sure about the bitter Jewish pogrom-survivor angle. I don’t know enough about that history or what the average intellectual with Russian Jewish ancestry thinks about Russia.

[B]ut the recent energy in the Attack-Russia crowd comes from the younger people – often millennials and recent Ivy League graduates in the media and in Washington. They are post Cold War and their hatred seems fresh and genuine. How does one explain that phenomenon?

This may be lazy but I’d say that in many cases it’s because it’s the Zionist line right now. The LGBT angle also makes it easy to whip up opposition toward Russia. In general, Russia has come to represent in many westerners’ minds the anti-liberal.

Wally, I was just quoting what Francis Boyle had to say, not necessarily endorsing every part of it. I don’t know that much about Russian history. (Sorry, I don’t know much about anything.) As for the 6,000,000, yeah, it’s very dubious, to put it mildly. I have serious doubts about the official Holocaust story, but I haven’t dug into it enough to make a strong assertion about it one way or another. I’ll just say the arguments against it are much stronger than I ever expected before I started looking.

There is a deep-seated, visceral need for an Enemy, that’s the point. Any kind of an enemy. At present the Flavor of The Month is Russia, with China waiting in the wings.

As a footnote–and I wish could remember his name– but earlier this week O’Reilly had some guy on his show who was a retired USMC “intelligence expert” who said in one breath that the CIA had “proof” that the Rooshians hacked the emails then in the next breath said that the CIA can’t release the information as it would compromise their operatives. Yeah, right!

“Nonetheless, half of Clinton’s voters still think Russia hacked the election day voting.[6]”

There are so many things that are wrong with the country . Some are transients some are less important and some could be brushed aside as angry response from the loser but also a fundamental shift could be seen in the dogged persuasion of the stupidities and visceral attachment to the absurd despite the inconsistencies,contradictions,and presence of collectively motivated misrepresentation ,among both party’s loyal supporters . These are loyal to party irrespective of the political social economic faiths and known behaviors of the candidates . Because they have sunk their own daily existential identities with that of a party, they find it difficult to move away from any party position . It is a religion and the arguments and the information are fixed and formatted to suit that unidirectional unyielding emotional intellectual existence . but it produces inertia , extinguishes curiosity, stifles the resistance ,reinforces the stagnation , and eventually reduces the power of the intellectual forces to guide the debate and the fate of the country. It does so by bringing out and giving prominence to the most vocal sentimental ignorant intellectually passive segment who dislike more intellectually inquisitive challenging neutral minded citizen and supporters with openness to new possibilities and ideas .
Nuances don’t matter . Blind belief becomes synonymous with resolve and steadfastness .
Bush Cheney destroyed the GOP Now Clinton is doing same with ample help from those whose interests she would serve best .( It is doubtful if Bush or Cruz or Huckabee or Graham or Rubio were the winner, we would be seeing this remonstration . So basically people are being schooled to follow certain official positions and lines Those positions are also the positions of the elite irrespective of the party affiliation .Party works for the elite that roam across the aisle . In this situation , the presence of thinking and discerning minds pose a risk . The zeitgeist is best preserved by the vocal assertive and effective presence of the sheeple dyed in different colors who would fight for the preservation of the colors and for nothing else .
Does it portend a decline of average IQ over times? If it does then the western civilization is digging its own grave . Even if it doesn’t in this particular route , the route that is being offered through stifling of any logical rational openness ,suppression of any kind of questioning and insistence on one kind of idea,value, and analysis leads to the same fate .

In general outline, this is pretty close to how I see it. I remember realizing that ISIS/Daesh was being used as an excuse to go into Syria. I don’t think I realized immediately that it was also just another proxy force used to overthrow Assad. So, typically, it was used for two purposes, just as Al Qaeda has been used to target governments the US wants to weaken, while also being blamed for attacks on western interests (9/11 being the most spectacular) and used as an excuse for war. It’s an elegantly multi-purpose operation.

As I said, I’ve only a vague and general idea of how the US security bureaucracy works at the top levels. I don’t know how the various SIS arrangements relate to the wider SES, or what the protections etc are, so I’m totally dependent on those who do know more for clues as to how things might play out when Trump takes office.

Common sense alone, though, surely suggests some sort of thorough purge, doubtless dressed up as reform and improving fitness for purpose, must happen now, no? Presumably that might mean something of a turf war between the Executive and the Legislative branches, since the old establishment is still strong in the latter.

Perhaps a few Executive Orders might be needed.

GS-15s might not be all that useful–they’re more likely to be thinking of their careers in four years if Trump isn’t re-elected (in the toilet).

That’s a sensible point, but iirc there are limits on bringing in outsiders, at least as far as SES is concerned.

It’s bureaucratic “inside baseball” things like this that Trump needs to be made aware of so that he can clean house in the intelligence establishment. It is obviously hostile to him.

Indeed. I’m sure there are plenty of people advising him in detail on all this. For the rest of us, it’s a spectator sport, from a distance.

“So why this unrelenting drive for more and more hostility? Can anyone explain this? Are there some deep emotional issues among the Washington elite? What’s the point?”

Many or perhaps most Washington elites, including Congressmen, US Supreme Court justices (Kagan, Sotormayor, and Roberts), and the former president are sodomites and pederasts. President Putin’s refusal to celebrate their alternative deathstyle INFURIATES them.

> the Soviet-spread rumor that the U.S. government developed the AIDS virus.

It was not a rumour, and has never been convincingly refuted. There was much scientific analysis behind the claim, connected to related viruses.

That made no sense in the 80s and makes no sense today.

The only “development” of a virus that had happended at that time was the development of the spanish flu in the trenches of WWI (and we still don’t know how that worked, really).

Hell, most of the stuff related to retroviruses still had to be written. Gallo was checking out Leukemia-causing retrovirus. Remember the grainy, bad photos that the Institut Pasteur published of “LAV”? Yeah. Grainy. That was the kind of tech back then. At some point wrong structure diagrams appeared in Scientific American and Nature. PCR was in its infancy. Computers were basically useless for deep data crunching. “Developing a virus” was just not possible. Germans coming up with fully functional ICBMs in 1914 sounds more likely.

You’re right–“reorganization” is usually the preferred way to go about removing personnel roadblocks. It’s the kind of thing, however, that a president usually doesn’t have time for (at least the details), so someone in the particular agency, or possibly the White House staff, has to identify the problem and make the appropriate changes.

What I really like about this “analysis” is the total lack of cohesiveness behind it. The number one goal as stated by the CIA was to make sure Hillary did not get elected. However, Hillary herself in the e-mails admitted that she wanted the people she likened to buffoonish wackos like Trump or Cruz to get the nomination since she really believed she would mop the floor with them.

Since Putin was personally doing the hacking he had to know this. How did the FSB under Putin know that Trump was the better candidate than those that Hillary feared more – Kasich or Fiorina? Putin is positively diabolical. The average person would have assumed Hillary’s 8 year long campaign (the Clinton foundation posing as a charity but really being Hillary’s campaign team) would know far more about the electorate than the FSB. Given that, the FSB should have sabotaged Trump and Cruz and gotten Kasich the nomination. Considering the depths the GOPe went to sabotage both Trump and Cruz this could have been quite easy to do. However, the FSB correctly gave the nomination to Trump who they knew to be the better candidate.

I have been reading about the CIA’s many failures but given this stunning success by the FSB, I think we have another reason to be glad that Trump won and we will have better relations with Russia – the FSB may be able to train the CIA to actually get something right.

The best account I’ve read of the 1918 “Spanish” flu is that it jumped from pigs to humans in an Army camp in Kansas (Fort Hays, perhaps), and was then carried to Europe by American troops. It may, however, have mutated into a deadlier strain in Europe and was then carried world-wide. My grandmother was teaching school at the time and said she remembered it very well–a child would come to school in the morning feeling fine, leave ill in the afternoon and be dead the next day.

Nothing of the sort is going to happen. Trump will improve relations with Russia and lower the global war fever whether the Democrats like it or not. They can pass all the laws they want; he will veto them and the veto will be sustained. As for McCain and his wife, Lindsey Graham, they are national laughingstocks, buffoons whose influence will decline to zero on 20 January.

At the end of the day Trump will never allow these crackpots to force him into any confrontation with Russia, or anybody else. The American people want peace, they want friendly relations with anybody willing to be friendly and they want economic growth and jobs. They will back Trump 100 percent.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the M-I complex faced a big problem: how to maintain huge defense budgets when the main enemy had suddenly disappeared. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 provided them with a temporary solution, as did 9-11. What we are witnessing now is the latest chapter of this saga. Ross Perot was right: follow the money.

It depends on your point of view. From we schmucks who have to pay for it all, it’s worse than pointless. From the rulers’ point of view, there are many of them as shown by the other replies.

To understand their points, here are a few primers.

Why, my fellow citizens, is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any child here, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? The real reason that the war that we have just finished took place was that Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her, and’ the reason why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought Germany would get the commercial advantage of them. The seed of the jealousy, the seed of the deep-seated hatred was hot, successful commercial and industrial rivalry.

-Woodrow Wilson, Speech at the Coliseum in St. Louis, Missouri, on the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations (5 September 1919)

In an effort to PREVENT the war that Churchill called “unnecessary,” (WW2,) this 2 time Medal of Honor recipient wrote…

“… I spent most of my [33 years in the Marine Corps] being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.

Randolph Bourne left an unfinished, unpaginated draft of The State when he died during the flu pandemic of 1918. The draft was published posthumously, with some material incorrectly ordered, in Untimely Papers (1919). Nevertheless, The State, answers your question in detail.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war.

For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world.

It is a puzzle, there doesn’t seem to exist any adequate explanation. Maybe it really is just stupidity – ambitious people who are where they are because they know how to take tests, how to write ‘memos’, and how to please their elders.

One interpretation might be that American capitalism is based upon the need for constant expansion and in the course of that expansion obstacles along the way must be overcome. If it can no longer grow and expand it’ll implode upon itself. This is the inner dynamic forcing it’s outward movement. Russia has risen from the wreckage of twenty-five years ago and is now ascendant and represents a barrier. It has sabotaged US schemes in Ukraine and Syria and is asserting it’s own sphere of interest. An implosion of the US balloon would be disastrous since there is no ethnic, political or cultural cohesiveness within it to soften the impact.
The leadership has become divorced from everyday reality. Most are theorists with no real-world experience and all come out of the same 3-4 universities. In late stage empires that crumble the leadership class are often absorbed in petty rivalries, become decadent hedonists and distrust their own population. Incompetent and uncaring, they’re prone to rashness and taking the empire down with them. The US seems to be at that point.

But if Trump has some sort of business or personal ties to Russia, or if Russia has info on him that compromises him, then Trump would not likely try to take a stand against Russia, even if he feels humiliated.

Sorry to bother you with a simple practical problem: When I click “print” and get a printout of this article, something like like the right-hand ten percent of the text is missing. If anyone has a remedy, I would be grateful to know. I like to be able to read articles aloud to others.

Same reason as for hostility toward Serbs! The Serbs did not pose any treat to the Washington “elite”, yet they were demonized and destroyed. It was the thirst for Serb blood, and it is the thirst for Russian blood that is the driving force behind the polices of the Washington “elite”. Simply put: RUSSOPHOBIA.

The Russians have nothing on Trump, they FSB morons apparently thought him a laughing matter. But they know better now, Putin’s Dec 23 foolhardy blustering about his backward country building an unstoppable offensive nuclear capability. Within hours Trump roared back

Let it be an arms race … We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.

The idea started in peer-reviewed journals in the DDR, also appeared in the USRR. After that, they were publicised as pop-science. The main researcher was Jakob Segal, there were other names, but the two magazines I had with articles on it when overseas were stolen long ago, not a conspiracy, just the misfortune of not seeing a kleptomaniac as incapable of self-control, even with a friend. He is doubtless proud to show them off at times.

Similarity with the sheep Visna virus was a key point of the idea.

The US researcher Peter Duesberg was not absolutely sceptical on it, and his own ideas were unorthodox. He says that it is lifestyle, and not the virus as such, that causes AIDs. Needless to say, he had to be silenced.

Robert Gallo has been claimed to be the creator of HIV for a looong time. The claim is not entirely without basis.

If you look up any of the three names I mention, you will start to wonder.

I do believe that it was artificial, people who claim that wasn’t possible at the time are liars or fools.

Whether release into the wild was or was not intentional, the effort to oppose quarantine for carriers, and the associated political activity, is the base of western ‘gender’ bs politics, perhaps an unintended consequence.

I sure don’t know, nor claim to, but have followed the controversies, disinfo and social effects more closely than most.

The third piece was published on July 29 2016, the country is Russia and the leader is Vladimir Putin.”

Frankly, anyone who claimed still to believe the US intelligence community and the US establishment after the Kosovo war, let alone Iraq, was either stupid, ignorant, dishonest or simply blinded by patriotic loyalty. One of the major effects of this latest comedy j’accuse from the aforementioned intelligence community and establishment will be to remove the patriotic blinders from a few more Republicans and conservatives in that last category.

Wapo should be called “Washington Pravda”. It’s just like the old days when Pravda would rant about reactionaries, wreckers, revisionists, and capitalist roaders. “There’s nothing wrong with our system comrades, but it’s the interference from the Americans!” Same thing in reverse now.

NYT could be “New York t-Izvestia”.

They just keep developing one lie after another, until eventually the sheeple will buy into one.

Sure, the German’s didn’t have a fully functioning ICBM in 1914, but they were almost there (V-II) not much later, despite all development having been stopped or impossible in most of the intervening time.

Genetic manipulation beyond selective breeding goes back to the 1950s, with radiation-induced mutation most famously producing the pink grapefruit.

Sure, the ’70s tech. in open puplications for genetic manipulation was often scattergun (in the literal sense, using small explosive charges to implant genes in the target) but effective at times.

How do you know that germ-warfare labs were not already using enzyme-based splicing techniques, or just got lucky with the scatter-gun technique?

I don’t know that they did, and you don’t know that they did not.

Enzyme-based work was just a few years from becoming public knowledge.

Playing around with microorganisms in those ways does not require a full map of the genome, or of the RNA of such viruses.

Many experiments outside the germ-warfare labs produced interesting results (disclaimer：I do not approve at all, of any of it), so why do you not consider that, say, Fort Detrick may have been way ahead of the curve of civilian research?

“McCain and Graham, who have already said that they will introduce Russian sanction legislation”

Why are people still voting for these two?

I realize that sometimes there is no choice. Like the time when the Chicago mayoral elections were held. We did not have much of a choice. I received a call inquiring as to to who I would vote for?
I responded “Non of the above”.

Sorry to bother you with a simple practical problem: When I click “print” and get a printout of this article, something like like the right-hand ten percent of the text is missing. If anyone has a remedy, I would be grateful to know. I like to be able to read articles aloud to others.

Thanks for alerting me, I’ve fixed the bug. Though it may take a bit of time to propagate around the Internet.

” but going back to Russia’s negotiation to thwart an attack on Syria in response to the chemical attack which was being blamed on the Syrian government. That seems to be when things really started heating up.”

EXACTLY. That began with the frenzy over “Will gay Olympians be safe in Sochi?” nonsense in US Big Media. Also when Code Pink and progressive media (aka Big Media’s little brother) got all hot and bothered about Pussy Riot. (Did Vice News even understand the reference to chickens at the end of this video?)

Pussy Riot Gets Whipped in Sochi

Plus the obligatory slandering of Sochi facilities construction. All spite and sour grapes over Syria.

As for “…the bitter Jewish pogrom-survivor angle” that would be Fucktoria Nuland, et al. Plenty of them find it useful to nurse their Russia hatred.

Here is an article on the demonized RT, which points, sadly, to the obvious – the lack of professionalism on the part of “intelligence” community: https://www.rt.com/op-edge/372942-rt-us-intelligence-reveal/
It seems that the prolonged swarming of the incompetent and opportunists in the intel community has finally resulted in a thorough deterioration of the community. The overall impression of the report is that the “intelligence” community has succumbed to the unprincipled and ignoramuses that care not about the US (or about such trifles as truth and honesty and normal human decency) but only about their next paycheck. The circus of election pales before the apparent tragicomedy of dysfunction at the highest echelons of the US government.
The pitifully low intellectual level of the ongoing “Russians-did-it” campaign also makes a fascinating impression that the puppets (MSM, DNC, MoveOn, Corn, DailyKos and such) have been imitating their sclerotic patrons. For instance, reading Michael Weiss (of DailyBeast) makes one think that the poor presstituting Weiss is suffering an early onset of dementia. Here is one of his recent opuses showing that Mr. Weiss (Jewish emigre from Russia) wants to snatch the laurels of Russophobia from Masha Gessen: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/07/inside-the-kgb-playbook-to-recruit-americans.html?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon

Yesterday Friday 1/6, the US army unloaded 89 tanks and vast amounts of other armaments along with thousand of troops at the port of Bremerhaven. Germany.
They are headed for Poland and the Baltic nations to harass Russia.

It will be another splendid little war for us, fought in Europe, not America.

And then after we have destroyed bits and pieces of Poland and the Baltic countries, we can pay further billions to rebuild them after we are defeated.

OffGuardian on participation of the Guardian in the anti-Russian folly: https://off-guardian.org/2017/01/06/34553/
“The Guardian’s anti-Putin propaganda has gotten into the bizarre. The editors have lost touch with sanity.”
Why the insanity? – Money.
“The Guardian and Soros-connected New East Network run anti-Putin and anti-Russia propaganda daily. There is no shortage of pro-Ukraine propaganda either. That propaganda spills over onto the Guardian website. This is a sinister conflict of interest for the Guardian. It should make a full disclosure of the financial arrangements between itself and Soros.
George Soros has made his fortune on currency speculation, regime change, coups and vulture capitalism. His current venture of destruction is Ukraine. Soros financed NGO’s that fueled the US led coup against the elected government of Ukraine and installed a cabal of fascists. Soros is a major backer of anti-Putin NGO’s in Russia. Soros constantly lobbies the US and the EU to bail out Ukraine with Billions of dollars, of which he would be a big beneficiary. Soros lobbies the US and the EU to destabilize Russia, which again would benefit him in Billions of dollars (here).”
Peace is not profitable for the warmongers and financial speculators.

btw: if those vile hatemongers had done what they did in a Russian church in a mosque or synagogue here in the US, they would either be beaten to death or be forever hounded by ADL and disappear from public life.

But the anti-Christian mafia here in the US treat them like they are Joans of Arc.

It was not Putin. It happened around 1985. The Russian spy services planted an article in one of their friendly Indian newspapers that the AIDS virus was created by evil American government scientists at our bio war research facility at Fort Detrick MD near Washington.

Liberals of course fell for it and it was a well known conspiracy theory for a few years.

Policy wonks reinforcing existing delusional ideology….for example….in September, the Atlantic Council, a mainstream US geopolitical think tank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world “marked by the breakdown of order, violent extremism [and] an era of perpetual war”. The new enemies were a “resurgent” Russia and an “increasingly aggressive” China. Only heroic America can save us.

Two highly recommended reads:

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

I think its just the last big emergent behaviour of the collective employed by the MSM/Government that are afraid of losing their livelihood with the President-elect at the helm. What if he decides to downsize these “departments” drastically? I am not wise enough to know whether that is a good or a bad thing for the economy.

How many people are employed and/or involved on a day-to-day basis producing fake/biased news and maintaining the “official” narrative? This has been going on for a while now on a massive scale…

Fake voices/Falsettos crying out in a last ditch effort to prevent the guy from taking the oath…

The Russian spy services planted an article in one of their friendly Indian newspapers that the AIDS virus was created by evil American government scientists at our bio war research facility at Fort Detrick MD near Washington.

Assuming that you’re right that it first appeared in an Indian newspaper (I have no idea if that’s true, but let’s assume) – how do you know that “Russian spy services planted” it, eh?

Also, an article in an Indian newspaper (no matter who planted it – Russian spy services, or the chief editor trying to sell more papers) is not exactly how world-wide rumors start.

I believe there’s a much more likely sequence of events: a new deadly disease arrives -> a number of people will assume it came from a government lab -> American secret bio-war labs are assumed to be most advanced -> therefore they assume it came from an American secret bio-war lab. That’s the logic, and this is why/how these rumors start. Articles in Indian newspapers are secondary.

I know I saw it the first time in a local communist paper, and it was pretty outrageous, Alien Technology levels (or maybe we have a hidden country where we can run secret tests on a population to study a radically unknown virus, unit 731-style?)

No way this was real.

The paper also peddled theories that there was no Hitler-Stalin pact and that Stalin came to the rescue of Poland and just had to invade out of kindness among others. But they bit the ankles of the local worthies too, so there is that.

Also, conspiracy people need to make up their mind. Does AIDS come from lifestyle or from an engineered virus? Can’t have it both. How about a naturally mutating virus that was rendered potent via lifestyle? Sounds better, eh?

HOW is Russia supposed to have affected the elections? MSM are not saying.

The MSM are in full Pravda campaign mode again, hitting the “Russia hacked elections” meme hard.

What they are NOT talking about is their theory of the case – HOW the election is supposed to have been affected.

Think about it: even assuming that:

(1) Russia did hack information from Podesta, DNC etc.

AND further assuming that

(2) Wikileaks disclosures were based on Russia’s hack rather than insider leaks or private hackers (both options are much more likely);

HOW is the disclosure of information supposed to have affected the elections? Of course, voters making decisions based on actual, primary facts – which Wikileaks are – rather than MSM spin would have been a good thing.

However, it seems unlikely given the timing and the continuing overwhelming role played by establishment media in the U.S. as well as the timing that anywhere near enough swing voters were exposed to the information in a way that could have made a difference to the outcome.

“Russia hacked elections” is a cynical meme put out by Frankfurt School Alinskyite Narrative Jihadis in a last-ditch effort to undermine the credibility of the incoming Trump administration.

Meanwhile, neither party is talking about MILLIONS of illegal “votes” for Hillary cast by ilegales or dummied up by SEIU gangsters in the usual suspect inner city locations and union-strangled blue states.

Donald should request 2 or more points of view in intelligence questions, and each side
presents their evidence. This is called red/blue team approach. Then have several people on your staff that have full security clearance, and which take opposite points of view on intelligence matters. Ask the briefer to present a technical brief with raw intelligence to both of these people. Then President Trump can get the red/blue official report, and a summary from his own red/blue team. This might allow a fair chance for both sides, and escape the political filter from the agencies from blocking the true nature of the intelligence evidence from reaching the President’s eyes.

The Atlantic Council is a shelter for such “expert” as Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellincat that delivers steadily various Russophobic information. Higgins’ expertise involves selling ladies underwear and… basically that’s all. No college degree, no personal experience in the Middle East and Russia, no military training. – Looks right for the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, UK.
Another “expert” at the Atlantic Council is Dmitri Alperovitch, the inventor of the name “Fancy Bear” and such (used to designate Russian hackers and their supposedly mighty influence on the last US elections) and the owner Crowdstrike that is the main course for the US intel community to claim “Putin is guilty” that H. Clinton has lost.
Who is Dmitri Alperovitch? – A Jewish emigre from Russia where he received both his superb technical education and visceral hatred towards Russia. The Russophobia pays currently well in the US, so Mr. Alperovitch has been hastily cashing on the hysterics of the cold-war warriors and ziocons.
The ziocons have been assembling a small army of Russophobic Jewish emigres from Russia. This jolly army of opportunists includes Masha Gessen, Michael Weiss, Dmitri Alperovitch and such. Their main (and guided) activity is to keep the world ready for more amazing policies by the US “deciders.”http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/01/08/new-intelligence-report-adds-no-evidence-russian-hacking.html

Annamaria,
In response to your quote about Soros “George Soros has made his fortune on currency speculation, regime change, coups and vulture capitalism.” do you think that he may try to be a new Rothschild? Soros appears to have some global control ambitions. Some generations ago Mama Rothschild was reported saying that if her sons did not want war then there would not be war. That was from financing different European countries who borrowed to make war.

If there was any integrity left to our “Establishment Media” the main thrust of the nations conversation would not be the unsubstantiated Putin hacks and “their” effect on our democracy, but how the grotesque, criminal “tinkering” of the DNC nomination for Hillary (by the backroom party bosses) actually undermined it.

The bona fide assault on our democratic process is what is revealed BY the leaks ……not the leakage itself, or its sources.

Big Media, acting in vile collusion with our contemptible (and systemically corrupt) “political class”, has proven itself to be nothing more than the enemy of the people.

The “stink in the swamp” is getting worse and worse by the day….Lets hope President Trump, once in office, gives them all a big fat punch in the nose.

Well of course there is another big story about foreign interference in government, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be getting the same establishment push as the comedic “Russia manipulates superpower “story:

It’s long been my view that our MPs should be constitutionally barred from membership or association with organisations pushing the interests of foreign states. Is it finally time to drive these poisonous “friends of Israel” organisations back into the shadows? I won’t be holding my breath, to be honest.

It’s funny how the issue of Hitlery’s illegal use of home computor /server to do state dept work/home work? has been successfully conflated and replaced with Russian hack job.

Stickin’ it to Bernie, as he agreed to lay down, but the convention was BS, of course everybody wants to deny it, but are all relieved not to have that loose cannon… loose on deck.
It’s better to try the Devil you don’t know once in while.

Good point – the way most ‘rumors’ start is that multiple people think of something possible and create a story that fits what is happening. It is an organic response to new events and to the uncertainty they create.

It happened with AIDS, Zika, all viruses, and almost all new scary events. It is very likely that intelligence agencies, ‘think-tank’ adventurists, and lots of individual busy-bodies all over the world feed it, but that is neither essential nor necessary for these rumors to spread. Humanity had rumors before KGB or CIA, and will have then after. We need rumors to ease the stress of newness and of scary new things that might (or might not) be happening.

AIDS was a perfect story to ‘rumorize’ – new, scary, hard to explain to simpler people, and full of potential for wild story twists – african monkeys, Belgian adventurers (anything with ‘Belgium’ in it spices up a rumor), ‘patient zero’, weird sex, death, exotica and drugs. I am sure it generated a mythology of different story-lines.

We can see the established meme of the “KGB spread a fake story about AIDS….” as a form of a derivative counter rumor. It is plausible, it can be used to establish other story-lines (“KGB is an evil organization that lies and might be responsible for just about anything bad happening”), and by repetition it serves as a standard example in the “narrative”. But that also doesn’t mean it was invented or planned, by let’s say CIA – as a response it probably originated in many minds and spread organically because of its usefulness. The “Indian newspaper” was a nice touch – it shows how adaptable our minds are in exploring stereotypes.

By the way, just for clarity, the term “narrative” we use today is just the old term “propaganda”….

I like this one. That explanation with the ‘money, careers,…’ angle makes most sense. There is also an obvious attempt to misdirect attention from other things – Clinton’s pure crapiness as a candidate, manipulated Dem primaries, attack on FBI (that had to be ended, it was very disruptive).

The main outcome so far has been to lower the public discourse to a paranoid, scared and emotional level. The secondary outcome will be postponing or canceling any normal Trump relations with Russia (and trying to remove him if he tries).

The third outcome could be adding a large step on our way to a nuclear war oblivion. We are a few events away from that becoming likely, let’s hope we are lucky and the “policy wonks” get busy doing something less catastrophic. Like fixing up their resumes so they can cash in with Google…

FT A month before the US election, as tension flared between Moscow and Washington over the war in Syria, Russia moved nuclear-capable Iskander missiles into Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Lithuania and Poland. Two days later, Dmitry Kiselyov, Russia’s unofficial propaganda chief, warned that any clash of US-Russian forces in Syria could escalate dangerously. “Impudent behaviour by America,” he declared in his current affairs television show, “has a nuclear dimension.” […]The moves came amid the most intense nuclear posturing by Moscow since the Soviet era. Over three weeks, Russia cancelled three nuclear deals with the US. The city of Moscow ordered checks on its fallout shelters as 40m Russians held civil defence drills. State TV warned the US was about to start a war, comparing tension over Syria with the Cuban missile crisis.

Then on the 23 of Dec Putin tried to menace the West by saying Russia should get new and more effective nuclear weapon capability. But he forgot he wasn’t dealing with Obama, within hours Trump gave an interview in which he said said that no one was a match for the US if it came to an arms race.

Perhaps a simpler way to think about the election outcome is to apply a “BUT-FOR” test:

BUT FOR Wikileaks, would H. Rodham Clinton have won?

How many voters were aware of the SUBSTANCE of what was disclosed through Wikileaks?

Although it surprisingly hard to ascertain what motivates low-information/MSM-information voters particularly when one sees the world through a fog of PolSci “sophistication” (which is why Trump’s team won), one would guess that Hillary’s use of a homebrew server became known to more voters and raised more suspicions than Wikileaks ever did.

On a separate point, the alleged MANNER of the Podesta hack (through a “phishing” email that he clicked) strongly suggests that his emails were hacked by a private individual or group. Government-level actors have rather more powerful hacking tools in their toolboxes and do not need to wait for the hapless hacking victim to click on a suspicious email link.

Hillary personally never seems to have considered what an email server DOES: it passes messages – in clear text without encryption! – to and from other servers until they reach their destination. Each of those servers is subject to hacking.

So far, so true. What is striking is the DOG THAT DID BARK. Governments are usually very shy about disclosing that they were penetrated (as we know from much later disclosures of historical penetration).

WHY did the Germans announce their own incompetence rather than quietly switching to a more secure phone system?

Could it be that Merkel’s entire team is being blackmailed, and some members wanted to put out a “limited hangout”? The sudden importation of masses of unvetted Muslims is neatly aligned with Barry Obama’s personal penchants, but it is hard to see why someone in Merkel’s position would choose this option.

I believe there’s a much more likely sequence of events: a new deadly disease arrives -> a number of people will assume it came from a government lab -> American secret bio-war labs are assumed to be most advanced -> therefore they assume it came from an American secret bio-war lab.

Remember the anthrax attacks at the time of 9-11? The strain traced back to US bioweapon lab. It’s not always just sheer fantasy and paranoia.

Most all of the Russian ex-pats are Jews that were unhappy in Russia and are quite anti Russian and anti Putin. They see Russia as an anti_semitic country. Russia has true freedom of speech where there is no politically correct filter, and the true opinion of people actually is voiced publicly – stuff you could never get away with in the US or you would incur the wrath of the local Chabad Lubavitch vigilantes- you would lose your job at the very minimum.

What good does a concise lie do? This ability to filter out descent is so dangerous that Trump would be better with nothing at all. At the minimum, have an adversarial team look at the raw evidence and each write 5 pages then, if thats all the time the President has.

“Most all of the Russian ex-pats are Jews that were unhappy in Russia and are quite anti Russian and anti Putin.”
Correct. Unfortunately, some of the former Soviet Jews are viciously Russophobic. But to be fair, the majority of the former Soviets in Israel use any opportunity to leave Israel, whether for Canada or US or Germany. Should this flight be called an expression of anti-Semitism?

Most all of the Russian ex-pats are Jews that were unhappy in Russia and are quite anti Russian and anti Putin.

I’m not sure this is entirely true. Most Russians moved to Israel during the 90s, to escape the post-Soviet catastrophe (‘catastroika’). I get the impression that a vast majority moved there for purely economic reasons; very few were fanatical Zionists. Many of them aren’t accepted as first-rate citizens (those with non-Jewish mothers).

To summarize: yes, they were unhappy (or simply couldn’t survive) in Yeltsin’s Russia. Whether most are anti-Russian and anti-Putin, I don’t know, but I kinda doubt it. They probably still have friends and relatives in their native country, they probably visit there, life is much-much better there now, and Mr Putin’s popularity is sky-high…

I had some friends at university who were Jews or partial Jews from Russia (mostly brought by their parents) and they were a very unpredictable group. As with many children of people who move across the world, there is an eclectic randomness and instability about their views. If they have any.

Many would take dramatically different views depending on the situation, audience, mood, etc… so a rabid “Russians are stupid peasants” view is followed with “bolsheviks were right and cool”, “I love Russian culture”, Westerners are “faggots”, even surprising anti-semitism, and even more, racist , anti-Arab views. Many have a real issue wth the whole religious aspect of Judaism and many are also very, very ethnically mixed.

I know some of those attitudes are not necessarily inconsistent and many people have similar confusing collections of attitudes – but with younger Russian Jews that is often combined with skillful political activism and a passion to prevail. That creates an unstable mix, so any generalizations are almost impossible. It also makes a sub-section of these activists susceptible to being used for other people’s agendas – they are skilled, opinionated, have credibility (I am not always sure why), and can be used. My experience has been that individually there is a lot more nuance and complexity about their views – they at least get the context and the trends. But there is always that strong desire to prevail and that pushes our world in a very risky direction. Nevertheless, it is quite entertaining.

Many would take dramatically different views depending on the situation, audience, mood, etc…

Yeah, I know. These are not really ‘views’ as such. These people are cynical. It’s a, I dunno, sorta like an art of making a conversation. Picking up any theme and developing it in any unpredictable direction. A way of killing time while drinking in a small company.

Anyway, I’m sure there are some who hate Russia and Putin (mostly the Soviet dissident variety), but I’d be surprised if it was a majority.

Agree. “…the usual point of US foreign policy” is thievery of mineral resources and gold reserves in the hapless countries that were selected to experience the US/NATO “humanitarian interventions” and “democracy on the march”
Here is a great paper by Robert David Steele, “The Russians Did Not “Hack” the US Election – a Few Facts from a Former CIA Spy:” http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-russians-did-not-hack-the-us-election-a-few-facts-from-a-former-cia-spy/5567215
Steele gives a well-deserved black eye to the “perfumed princess and princesses” at the State Dept and CIA. He simply calls them traitors. Refreshing.
“Steele served in the Marine Corps as an 0203 Ground Intelligence Officer. After serving 4 years he joined CIA where he served for 10 years (3 tours overseas focused on extremist and terrorist targets). He resigned CIA to accept an invitation from the Marine Corps to stand up the Marine Corps Intelligence Center….” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_David_Steele

This is as cogent, concise and comprehensive an article as I have seen wrapping up the whole sheebang. Thank heavens for unz.com.

Sniegowsksi was doing an almost scholarly chapter & verse on the Bush neocons way back when the current phase of our hegemonic, PNAC (’96) disasters took a really quantum leap as we switched from Mahan to Mackinder to control the heartland AND the rimland in our 100-year efforts to dominate the globe.

Plus, read Stephen Kinzer’s “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq” (Times Books, 2006) for an instructive recitation of our government’s military bullying over the past 110 years–a good recitation of our mighty hypocrisy. Or Google: Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List, By William Blum – Published February 2013.

As to the why of all this: wwww.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/12/23/united-states-and-race-global-hegemony.html (three articles–and it’s a Russia-centric site)–explains it well.

“What if this is the way the Washington grown-ups are today?”
It is a vicious hatred of expropriators towards any resistance to their thieving-thuggish advances. They want these mineral resources now. They want this gold reserve now. The cognitive cacophony among the “deciders” is beyond comprehension: they are afraid of truth like vampires are afraid of light. This seems like a consequence of weeding out the principled and competent among the highest echelons of US government. Instead, as the propornot story shows, there is a triumph of DC career opportunists who would say anything and would do anything to get their money and to maintain their power. Rather scary.

Russian intelligence officers planned to blackmail Donald Trump with knowledge of his alleged “perverted sexual acts,” a new report obtained by Buzzfeed alleges. The unverified report by a person claiming to be a former British intelligence official alleges that Russian officials intended to blackmail Trump with evidence of him allegedly hiring multiple sex workers to perform “golden showers” in front of him. The hotel where the acts allegedly occurred were said to be under Russian surveillance.

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...leaving communism and bankerism as the lords of what once was the European world.
That should be crystal clear to anyone able to breathe on his own given what's been going vis a vis US military gangsterism even to this day. They don't even try to hide it any longer.
Major General Butler and ...

I think someone previously noted this.
Pre-emptive warfare is not new and rife with speculative reasons why someone is attacking someone else.
Botton line Germany did not have much of a case for war. The Allied powers had largely given up their attempts to exact revenge on Germany as e...

The losses of the Red Army in the early days were enormous because of unprecedented defensive measures.
I think you meant to write," The losses of the Red Army in the early days were enormous because of unprecedented lack of defensive measures on Stalin's part.

The thesis is interesting, but not convincing.
Just like your comment.
There is a difference between planning and preparing, and acting.
Duh. FYI, you may want to state that as a plural for the sake of improved accuracy.
Responsible defense requires planning and preparing.
Profound, yup.
...

Here's another perspective for the gulls, dupes, and other forms of true believers... especially the fool who posted "Drang nach Osten" as if it validates the standard tripe.
War propaganda has obscured the true facts of history, otherwise Americans might realize that the German record is no mo...

Yes, just ask General Vlasov
I came to you the Germans to fight. This is my profession, I have been doing this for more than 25 years. I believe that I am still quite a skilled and experienced general and military leader. I was also the Deputy Commissar of Defense. ... And here in Germany, I [am...

No one was happier than Iosef Stalin when the Germans launched Barbarossa
Yes he was so happy that he had a nervous breakdown you idiot. When the war started his politburo was so terrified to wake him up and tell him the ‘good news’ that they spent hours arguing as to who would break the new...

Now tell us how the USSR was formed, and explain it while yer at it. Did you read the article? How many times was the word."encirclement" used? Do you understand what it meant?
Did you know that some New York Jews declared war on Germany in 1933, complete with boycotts and financing of interna...

No one was happier than Iosef Stalin when the Germans launched Barbarossa
Yes he was so happy that he had a nervous breakdown you idiot. When the war started his politburo was so terrified to wake him up and tell him the 'good news' that they spent hours arguing as to who would break the news ...

In Mein Kampf Hitler clearly stated that he wanted Lebensraum in Russia, and in his Table Talk he waxed lyrical about how he would settle Germans in the East, use all its resources for Germany and reduce its Slavic population to serfdom. Nowhere in his Table Talk did he complain about Stalins "be...

The end of a lie
In 2015, a small German publisher publishes a book by Dr. Ing. rer. mil. Bernd Schwipper, Major General a. D of the East German Army (NVA): "Germany in the sights of Stalin".
Dr. Schwipper has studied at military academies in the GDR and in the Soviet Union and was most rec...

Why does anyone take the author of this article seriously? My first reaction was to ignore it as a futile attempt to re-write history to whitewash Nazism; on the other hand, it might have had some new useful insight into the workings of Hitler's brain, so I read the first paragraphs. But, alas,...

I have recommended it here before: "Who set Hitler against Stalin" by Nikolai Starikov. The author concludes that the whole war on Hitlers part was a giant improvisation.
It is devastating to see that a Russian nationalist Duma member gives more thought to what really happened back than then l...

The bellicose germans are always attacking neighbours , the poor germans think they are racially superior . Now they attacking economically and psychologically other countries of the European Union , they will be defeated as usual , the EU will not last .

If you were around and reading the news back then you would know that in addition to expanding territory, the threat of Bolshevism coming to Germany was a major factor for Hitler.
This edited interview of Adolf Hitler by George Sylvester Viereck took place in 1923. It was republished in Libert...